NBA Betting Guide for Friday 5/5/23: Fading the Nuggets Away From Altitude
Betting on the NBA can get a little overwhelming throughout the season because there are games every day, and there's just a lot to track throughout the season and entering every night -- spreads, over/unders, injuries, and so on.
But you can rely on numberFire to help. We have a detailed betting algorithm that projects out games to see how often certain betting lines hit. You can also track spread bet percentages at FanDuel Sportsbook.
Where can we identify value in tonight's NBA odds?
(All offensive rating, defensive rating, and net rating splits come from PBPStats.com and account for medium-, high-, and very high-leverage situations unless otherwise noted. All injury news and notes come from the official NBA injury report unless otherwise noted.)
Boston Celtics at Philadelphia 76ers
Philadelphia 76ers ML (+110)
Can the Sixers get back on the offensive glass? To me, that's the key for them to rebound -- pun intended -- in Game 3.
I picked the Sixers to emerge out of the Eastern Conference long ago on Covering the Spread, and this one would go a long way to making that a reality. After all, Philly won Game 1 without Joel Embiid but got mopped in Game 2.
A 34-point win in what's an eight-game postseason sample to this point is going to taint the net rating data for a bit, but something clearly stands out from the Four Factors in this series, per Basketball Reference:
| Team | Pace | eFG% | TOV% | Off Reb% | FT/FGA | ORtg | PPG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BOS (1-1) | 91.4 | 0.611 | 10.8 | 22.5 | 0.192 | 129.2 | 118 |
| PHI (1-1) | 91.4 | 0.521 | 8.5 | 17.1 | 0.185 | 112.7 | 103 |
The 76ers' postseason offensive rebounding rate is 33.1% overall, but it's just 17.1% to this point in the series. Boston's defensive rebounding rate (71.3%) is just 7th of the 16 teams during the playoffs, so they weren't this dynamic rebounding team in the Atlanta series.
I'd look for this as a key to getting back on track, which numberFire's model likes them to do. It's projecting Philly to win 57.0% of the time as a home underdog.
Denver Nuggets at Phoenix Suns
Phoenix Suns -4.0 (-108)
Under 225.0 (-112)
It's easy to forget the Nuggets play in an environment with significantly less oxygen than all but one other NBA arena in Utah.
It's arguably the best homecourt advantage in the league, but they become more of the team they were projected to be on the road. Denver's -3.0 net rating on the road this season was the 10th-worst mark in the NBA during the regular season, and it's just -0.2 through two road visits to Minnesota.
Now, they'll face the Suns, who have been scorching hot -- again, pun fully intended -- at home thus far. Phoenix crushed the Clippers with a +4.6 net rating last series at Footprint Center.
The Nuggets' offensive rating dropped from 119.9 to 113.7 on the road in the regular season, and the 95.3 pace in this series thus far has been glacial. Though Game 2 was an anomaly where both teams shot below a 52.0 eFG%, it's not like Game 1's total (232 points) was a high-flying circus relative to this mark, either.
That's probably why numberFire's model sees the under as the side 66.8% of the time. That's its favorite bet; yours truly expects Denver to pull back significantly away from altitude.
